Alpha Centauri thread?

From the Tripocalypse stuff:

"They are many, my friend, who think that I should hate you. That I, having become a symbol of Science itself, the relentless human drive to progress through understanding, through examination of the material world, should despise you as the utmost symbol of regressivism, of the cold dark night of the mind yearning to stifle the true face of hte human spirit. For the fact that, if you did not exist, Miriam would be little more than a somewhat more annoying than average motivational speaker."

"Or perhaps to hate you because you defy analysis, because physics as we know it bends to your will. That the rules by which we thoguht we knew reality to behave are as but mists before dawn as you spread your arms and speak your desires."

"I say what is needful in public. I'm sure you understand. It's nothing personal."

"We both know the truth. I adore you. So little truly remains to challenge my intellect, but you, you, my decompressed pseudosaviour, are a puzzle, an enigma. And I am going to take you apart to see what makes you tick. To take everything that you have that lets you, and your so-called father stand above us, and make of them first wonders, then breakthroughs, then parlour tricks, then simply knowledge, avialable to anyone with the will to learn it. I may even publish a paper or two. I'll make sure to use your name in them a fair bit as i'm told that's one of hte most important things to you, isn't it? Your name written down?"

"We have that in common, you and I, my friend. I'm so glad you're going to help me save humanity. And no, Yeshua of either Nazareth or Sheol, depending on what mood one catches Miriam in, you do not have a choice in the matter."

Basically, from what I grok, Jesus showed up either on Chiron or post-apocalyptic Earth, and was promptly tazed and locked up before being able to use his God powers.

> Zakharov doing a xcom-style autopsy on Jesus Christ

how horrifying.

Seriously though, does Zak fap to Dr. Vahlen, or the other way round?

lparchive.org/Sid-Meiers-Alpha-Centauri-(by-nweismuller)/ The other lparchive, showing off the softer side of Morgan. A less confusing read.

what

Fact: Any mention of SMAC in a forum thread will cause at least one person to reinstall the damn thing.

Is multiplayer still playable?

Does anyone have that one greentext of Aki crushing on Zakharov?

>There's a quality in quantity as Stalin put it.

lal has the best combination of quality (extra talents) and quantity (densely populated bases).

I think the more densely populated bases would better fit with Yang, but Lal gets them somehow.

>Feels delicious if you're playing as Sister Miriam.
Try Drones

...

>I think the more densely populated bases would better fit with Yang, but Lal gets them somehow.
It works perfectly fine as is:
Lal has better bases that offer better facilities and actively encourage outsiders to join. Meaning more room.
Yang has intentionally overcrowded bases where there is barely anything to do for entertainment. Meaning higher population growth

Drones do not start with shitty research that is further made worse by running theocracy

-4 Research vs -2 Research. Meaning crunch-wise, Miriam is worse, even if fluff-wise, Domai is weaker

>How do you do that if you aren't playing on potato difficulty?
My last Transcend game as Miriam I ended up doing that quite handily because Zak isn't a particularly strong AI (doesn't build particularly wide and doesn't make enough units) and doesn't seem to thrive very well if bullied by an expansionist AI. In this case, Yang kept him locked in a peninsula and slowly absorbed a few of his town

>Tripocalypse
What is that?

what good are great scientists without an equally great bankroll?

Wha'ts the deal with Cha Dawn? I mean, does he really has a personal link to The Planet?

>How do you do that if you aren't playing on potato difficulty?
Not him, but there are quite a few things to consider that ultimately lead to situation where human player is going to out-do AI in every single regard:
- AI in general is pretty weak
- Zak's AI doesn't really expand, not even if given empty continent with a jungle (that actually hurts him, due to population growing too fast), so the tech bonus is only revelant early on
- AI can't into terraforming, creating utterly ridiciulous tiles
- AI can't into satellites, like, at all
- AI can't properly use energy to speed things up
- AI can't into crawlers
- Zak AI, if having neighbour, has a really hard time defending, even if it's another peaceful AI in tune of Morgan or Lal, simply because it can't properly organise expansion
In short - against AI enemies everything is possible.
Trying to out-tech human-controlled Zak is meanwhile pretty much impossible.

Speaking of AI - did the fan project to improve AI went anywhere, or it pethered out? It can't really be that hard to teach AI how to use resources and forest tiles

It's a homebrew. Started off as a RPG thing, had a /qst/ that ran last year, ended up getting a bunch of fic written for it.

tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/FanFic/LeftBeyond

Basically it's a The Longest Journey style split timeline... one of which does have (post)humans fleeeing to Alpha Centauri and being poised to split up into factions once they get there.

Also Jesus gets locked up inside a SCP containment box but Shroedinger's Cats out of it, hence the split timeline.

It's piss easy for Drones. Just trade for Network Nodes and build them in each of your many bases.

Supposedly. He also doesn't need a respirator.

Reminds me of the Forest People from Nausicaa... then again so does the whole SMAC ecosystem.

Interestig that despite the whole mystical link thing, Deirdre can keep up with him on ecology.

SMAC does understated HFY, the best kind of HFY.

> tfw no smac quests

> did i miss a smac quest?

The person who ran the Left Beyond quest was supposed to do a SMAC-alike quest, but seems to have disappeared. They were waiting for their immigration papers or some such.

>Trying to out-tech human-controlled Zak is meanwhile pretty much impossible.
You sure that a hypothetical 1v1 game between Morgan and Zak couldn't have Morgan at least at tech parity?

We should try it. Does anyone play SMAC mp?

> expansion factions are like highlander/matrix sequels in that they do not exist

> not sure if samefag or people trying to write like the SMAC blurbs

We should make up SMAC blurbs for stuff that came about after 1999. Like Morgan talking about cryptocurrencies or Miriam talking about presuppositional apologetics.

I kind of feel like the expansion human factions aren't really full factions but extensions/variants or combinations of main game factions
>Nautilus Pirates
What if Morgan had owned a shipbuilding company and had most of his business sense replaced with piratonomics
>Cult of the Planet
aka: that one time when university researcher combined the DNA of Deirdre and Miriam and accidentally released the specimens into miasma
>Cybernetic Consciousness
The great question finally answered: yes, the university can become more autistic than it already is.
>Data Angels
Kids like hackers. That's why Lal had a reverse sex clone of himself to build an idealy extremely cool hacker society. And do cool hacker stuff.
>Free drones
The real good boy collectivism for those days when Yang gets too depressing
>Manifold Usurpers
Lord's believers, except with ayy jesus giving them right to use planet as they see fit

AI can't into crawlers period. Even giving them prebuilt crawler units doesn't mean they'll use it for resource harvesting.

In Left Beyond the Morgan expy is named Ryan Andrews and does build an underwater city.

Then gets into a turf war with the Svensgaard expy, who is a cybernetic mermaid named Tethys.

Then they get married because they decide that literally everyone else is beneath them. Then they buy seats on the Alpha Centauri starships.

This was a sidequest on the main quest. The whole thing is kinda trippy.

suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/qstarchive.html?tags=left beyond They show up in the last 5 threads or so.

There's this ADORABLE Zak/Aki fic on suptg but I can't find it right now.

> alien factions

ew.

Is it the one with the dancing?

yes

Ah, yes. LBQ. Spider tank autism and Bibleman references and all sort of weirdness.

I remember the thread in which the QM was setting up for a SMAC game that would be a sequel to it (similar setup as SMAC: the human survivors of Judgement Day had to pile up in one ship, and discovered on the way that they couldn't get along, and split up into factions as soon as they could) but then disappeared.

That plus how the quest was written and the fact that it kept going even when only one or two players were around, leads me to believe that it was the QM's last hurrah. He(?) kept talking about moving and getting a new job, but then vanished. I think he had a chronic illness.

IIRC the factions were:

> Ryan Andrews: Pretty obvious. More Morgan than Andrew Ryan in that he was generally pragmatic.

> Tethys: I guess Sveensgard/Deirdre? Techno hippy with a vat grown mermaid tail. There's been a /d/ thread about that lately.

> Urist: A genetically engineered (I think) Tolkien dwarf. From Dorf Fort, obviously. Domai type.

> Cordylon: A head in a jar whose job was to pilot the AC starship. Doesn't get ganked, but stays neutral and says that its job is now to keep the remainder of the starship safe in high orbit since someone has to keep watch in case God decides to attack.

> Ziggy: Who put the TF2 pyro in charge of a faction? Very militaristic, but not insane, per se.

Notably there was no Miriam equivalent because the characters were literally running away from God as described in Left Behind.

Each leader had a copy of the Omega, which is some folding@home thing that helps them run their faction. The quest players were Omega sysadmins in-universe, with enough access to do back deals and so on.

> literally the autistic illuminati

We should make up SMAC blurbs for stuff that came about after 1999. Like Miriam talking about presuppositional apologetics.

The modern origins of presuppositional apologetics are in the late 1920

What are you fucking retard blathering about?

FOUND IT! suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/13111584/

Secretly blushing, crushing Aki is now my personal canon. He loves science, and logic, and interesting ideas, right? Experiments that other, stupider people are scared of and don't understand, he loves those, right? So, she'll become what he loves! And he'll want to write a paper about her, no, a book, and they'll write it together and present it at the colloquium and get an award and there will be a big party and he'll hold her hand when they stand behind the podium and her stage fright will be gone, because she engineered it away and because he's there, and then there will be a reception and he'll dance with her (gotta get the proprioceptive muscle control circuits perfect so she can dance perfectly and he'll be so impressed) and then afterwards they'll both be tired and giggly and they go back to his room oh god oh god...

Then there's ANOTHER story with Zak and Aki talking after the Transcendence.

Hmm. The plot thickens. The LBQ stuff is hosted on the same server as the nametag of one of the contributors of that thread.

Looks like someone's been planning a SMAC/Left Behind crossover for 7 years, and delivered last year, and disappeared.

I get 1950s, but yeah. I guess a lot of people only heard of it as a new thing from youtube.

Miriam isn't a bible thumper of the Jack Chick variety, though. She's obviously educated in all world religions, managed to build her own syncresis, and at least at first raises good philosophical points (She seems to kinda start losing it in the later tech blurbs though).

> mfw Miriam is saner than the actual fundies that we get

This is how End of Evangelion should have been.

"Oh, hey, a giant Rei head."
"Let's do science to it!"

Would this make the manifold caretakers the Mary Sue faction we don't talk about?

We must dissent.

Original user here and nope, no fucking way. Morgan's only power lies in ability to get extra energy early on, BUT he has population limit that stunts his growth all the way till late game, can't use Planned (so no Dip-Plan combo), doesn't come with any research bonus whatsoever and generally can be outpaced in no fucking time by anyone.
Morgan is one of the weakest factions in both SMAC and SMAX by the way.

There is a reason why I pretty much always play with editor on. Because I can switch sides to AI, correct their terraforming actions and most importantly, set up crawlers. If you set up a crawler for AI, it will continue to use it, unless given tile will be within vicinity of a base.

>He doesn't play Drones using only bases gained via dron riots

Okay, a bit of sleuthing then.

emlia.org/portfolio/games/smac/ was last updated in November and there's a "for tg" build of SMAC. I downloaded it and it doesn't seem to have any LBQ stuff in it, but it does have a couple of custom factions built in.

tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Fanfic/LeftBeyond gives the RPG sourcebooks, such as they are (they look somewhat incomplete) as also being on emlia.org

The fics look like they were on the same wiki, but there was an effort to move them to www.fanfiction.net and now are mostly there. They are clearly not all written by the same person.

The "novelization" of the quest is also on fanfiction.net but ends abruptly and the last chapter posted is a brief rant about the Singularity that looks like it's been written by someone else entirely.

That's just what I mean, you'd never hear something like that out of Pat Robertson or Joel Olsteen.

> get money
> probe teams
> rush secret projects
> life is good

I can't tell if it was one guy who either has MPD or pretends to have MPD, or a case of a small group of fa/tg/uys getting shit done over the span of multiple years.

Doesn't Yang have a bonus against riots?

Okay, I'm not questioning your expertise, merely asking how to make this shit viable. As far as I know, powergaming with Morgan means heavy, heavy REX and relying on having a ton of strong center squares which with the right setup (Free Market + Demo, Recycling Centers) make the center tiles go 3/2/8+. You have to start building tight to maximize the good tiles, but then your economy snowballs and theoretically should be capable of matching Zak. You don't get a straight-up research bonus, but you get massive Energy.

Is Morgan really that weak? Most 4X games really give preference to economy-oriented civs, because economy can buy you anything you want, from tech to soldiers, but military-oriented traits like Santiago's or Miriam's don't really help you establish economy and are much less versatile in cases like an isolated start (since you have no one to war with).

Also Morgan can pop-boom through Golden Ages, Civ2 style, if I understand correctly.

The problem is - the net gain from +1 Economy doesn't even outweight HALF of the shit Morgan has to deal with on regular basis. You have very small bases (so can't properly use that Economy bonus), you can't pop-boom, you can't into Planned at all, your production rates are unchanged and you are literally 1 energy per base ahead of everyone else, unless you want to rape yourself and run Free Market, which will force you to not explore and not move your units anywhere at all. And that's still just meager +1 on every field, which won't be truly profitable before you have like 20 bases, each at least pop 6

And not the user you are replying to, but nope, nobody has such bonus.

A bit more literary stalking. On the same page there's a XCOM let's play in which the protagonist suffers from brain damage and needs an implant for it, which also shows up as a theme in LBQ (If this was written before XCOM2, it's actually pretty prescient: the multiple endings hint that everything after the mission in which he gets conked in the head may be a fever dream or a simulation).

I would guess that this particular fa/tg/uy has had a similar accident IRL, and alternates periods of being able to function/work/write with periods of being unable to.

If you are playing with the SMACX map, capturing the manifold nexus is a godsend for Zak. The small chance for mindworm capture is nice, but the main advantage is that fungus squares do something, so he needs a lot less terraforming early on. This lets him keep up with Morgan.

Yes, largely due to having an easy time affording psych spending. This is mitigated a bit by his lower pop cap... until it goes away, which generally happens sixty percent into the game, after which Morgan can grow exponentially.

Ah, thought Yang had some immunity... looked it up and it turns out it's immunity to inefficiency running Planned (Which is probably why Yang is usually the scariest AI).

Thing is, running free market as Morgan gives you ALL THE MONEY. You don't need to fight wars, you can explore with probe teams and bribe everyone into submission.

Morgan easily outprobes even the Angels because quantity wins over quality. The only problem is if Morgan's main adversary is Miriam, who is effectively impervious to this.

>unless you want to rape yourself and run Free Market, which will force you to not explore and not move your units anywhere at all.
Probe Teams and Supply Crawlers run on absolutely free upkeep, while the tight ICS allows you to maximize Former time by sharing forested tiles.

... and by mid game this model is no longer sustainable against human enemies. You simply can't grow wide as Morgan, nor can exactly grow tall, so all you have is that "super" base tile... and that's it. Beyond that, you are fucked.
And energy is pretty much useless anyway until at least Fusion Power tech (which is the end of early game)
>You don't get a straight-up research bonus, but you get massive Energy.
By mid game, Lady D has more energy than Morgan can dream off, just because she has +2 Efficiency and favours Green. It's not about how much your tiles make, but how much of it you can get before Inefficiency kicks in.
Daily reminder Knowledge gives Morgan more energy than Wealth, just because one provides Efficiency bonus, while other is just raw gain in energy production (note that I ignore the fact Wealth also adds +1 Industry)

He can't, because he can't run Planned. You need to have a combo of Democracy, Planned and Golden Age to get pop-boom.
Anyone who can't run Demo-Plan is instantly weaker. That's also why Lal, Lady D and Zak are much, much stronger than they look (Miriam doesn't count, because she doesn't look weak to begin with).

+1 industry adds up to quite a bit of savings if you plan to buy your units rather than build them.

The xcom aliens invading Chiron would be kinda hilarious... wait, that's basically the expansion, never mind.

Why would anyone mix Left Behind and SMAC though.

Morgan's trade bonus lets him benefit greatly if Planet is by and large at peace, and he isn't the best militarily, so it's in his best interest to play peacekeeper (more so than Lal). His effective probe team advantages compound this.

Beyond Earth isn't Skub. There are no pro-BE people.

>Thing is, running free market as Morgan gives you ALL THE MONEY
At the cost of knocking out your capability to move. Meaning Free Market is only useful once you are done exploring (which is not early game, where it would be most profitable) or when you simply don't want to explore for whatever reason. Also, combined with Support penalty and the fact you are most likely running Democracy, your Support is at -3. You can't fucking build any units beyond first one, because you can't support them. Under Free Market, you can't even move them outside bases without causing severe issues, for which you will have to pay with Psych...
... so all your profit went on pacification of drones. Marvelous!

... and you are still behind everyone else in population, so? As Morgan, you literally can't benefit on one of the best Secret Projects, Planetary Transit, solely because how severe your population limit is - you build bases that barely can grow beyond the PT bonus.

tl;dr Morgan is bottom rung of factions. Definitely the weakest of original seven, with SMAX added he's 2nd or 3rd worst.

> there are no probe people

>people still don't understand that Domai is Yang's manchurian agent whose purpose is to instigate instability in every other faction

To get a Golden Age going, you need +6 growth and no Drones. Can't you just boost your Psych allotment, get Children's Creches (rushbuy them with the massive amount of cash) and just amass Talents to achieve this? Maybe with Human Genome Project?

That's too clever.

probe teams make for good scouts, in addition to being probe teams.

Popbooming is possible with Morgan, it's just not as easy as with, say, Deirdre.

strategywiki.org/wiki/Sid_Meier's_Alpha_Centauri/Morgan_Industries Here's a howto.

That's the kind of fuckery Yang would do, though.

So are we trying to Chris Chan some guy because he ran a quest, or what?

But it doesn't add up when you are trying to first earn that Energy. That +1 Industry cuts off 2 energy per row. For the effect to be noticable, you would have to speed up something that costs 60 or more minerals. Meanwhile, the +1 Efficiency from Knowledge grants (assuming maximum efficiency of base placement) you fuck-huge bonus, since it's a multiplied by EIGHT in the equation toward energy lost by inefficiency. Meaning you would have to be gaining less than 12 energy per base via +1 Efficiency from Knowledge to benefit on +1 Industry on Wealth.
I might not have a Math degree, but the calculation is so simple that it renders the +1 Industry bonus useless when picking against +1 Efficiency, because you would have less than 6 bases in the nearest vicinity of HQ to benefit on Wealth bonus toward your production

tl;dr +1 Industry and +1 Economy combined are inferior to simple +1 Efficiency.

Considering trade is related with base sizes and he himself is fucked over base size, it balances itself out as if he didn't have that bonus. Essentially, what he gains via that semi-secret +1 trade rating is nullified by the fact he has population way below average.

Can anyone imagine this type of calculations for BE?

Okay, you have a point in that the math checks out. How would you play Morgan then? He's one of the factions that benefit most from a prolonged peace, which works well fluffwise.

I'm trying to figure out if this guy is still alive, since there's some decent writefaggotry there and some of it should at least be preserved in case the site goes down for nonpayment.

No. BE is basically Dan Brown to SMAC's Umberto Eco. Which is sad. Then again, keep in mind that SMAC was mostly Brian Reynolds' effort, not Sid Meier's.

All they had to do with BE was update SMAC's graphics and AI a little...

Anyone got that "what I expected vs what I got" image for BE? The one with looping caravans as final game experience

>tl;dr +1 Industry and +1 Economy combined are inferior to simple +1 Efficiency.
Yes, but consider Deirdre, a Civ which does have an efficiency bonus; if she runs Demo/Green, she effectively "wastes" some of her efficiency bonus, and there's no point in running Frontier/Green. Fundie/Green is not really useful unless you're in total war mode. She can't run Free Market either.

Max Effic is easy to get with just running Demo/Green on any faction. I'm fairly certain Morgan's research is strongest when he runs Demo/Green/Wealth.

Fundie/Green is not war mode, it's tentacle rape mode. Fundie/Green/Power even more so.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. You can stay there the whole game and win.

The hybrid affinities fix that a little, but only a little.

>How would you play Morgan then
By not playing him. He's the least interesting, least fleshed out and least useful mechanically of all factions.
If I do end up playing as Morgan (which usually means random pick during multi) I'm doing my best to get Command Nexus. If I won't get that thing, I'm essentially fucked, no matter what. If I'm not the first one to hit the techs removing restrains on food production, I'm also fucked.
Essentially, early game hell to secure position, otherwise you can pretty much quit.

>if she runs Demo/Green, she effectively "wastes" some of her efficiency bonus,
Explain to us how the hell having surplus to use from is "wasting"? She can easily afford running Planned without going into red. Only Yang can do that, and he has eseentially a cheat mode to pull that, but he's also perpetually stuck at 0 Efficiency, meaning growing wide kills him anyway

What community of SMAC players do you come from? I'm endlessly interested in how the high-level meta looks like.

Hi, LBQ QM here. I am alive, I do in fact have a small amount of lingering brain damage from head trauma but it's an old accident and I'm not in any danger of dying or losing my marbles, I've just been really busy with work and I'd rather run another quest when things are less hectic so that I can do it properly. Thanks for the concern. If anyone has questions about Left Beyond or Tripocalypse or any of the crap I wrote, please ask, but I'd rather not derail the thread.

Also, Morgan is probably the only faction where I don't rush toward Ascetic Virtues. It's simply not worth it, because you are going to get "normal" bases out of it and if playing multiplayer, the other side will most likely just nuke your base with Virtues.

stop that

>All they had to do with BE was update SMAC's graphics and AI a little...
Wasn't there some fuckery with the copyright? I seem to remember that they were legally unable to port over the storyline directly, and had to write it again, which is both why it isn't SMAC2 and why it's suckier.

although I actually did like BE as it's own game. It's okay.

I'd love to know how that works in fluff.

"See those people living over there? They were so high and mighty and they got nuked! I'll stick to watching the Simpsons."

I think that was Civilization 3....

I've been playing with my friends since early 00s and then there are guys from CivFanatics and Apolyton.
The "high-level meta" simply assumes you are familiar with all the formulas that govern the game and play accordingly. Plus a lot of careful micro. As in - A LOT. To make it less game-breaking, certain things are usually negotiated before the game (like for example limits on crawling or "no nukes" rule)

Glad you're okay (if you actually are the same person). What happened with the LBQ novelization on ff.net?

It's both.
But yeah, SMAC is one of those games that is in eternal limbo due to copyright. To unfuck the situation, you would need AT LEAST 4 different law suits and cases draging for years, costing so much money nobody cares nor see the point.

The person who played Quinn was supposed to be in charge of it. I guess she got bored.

Yep. At least they worked it out enough that you can buy it on gog.

Is the former AI any good?

SMAC getting on GoG is absolutely nothing when compared with the fucked-up situation regarding Sierra's city builders. Due to Impression Games being dead and Sierra essentially being a reanimated corpse that first went through Vivendi (while still making games) and then Activision (when it was euthanised), the rights to their library ended up so spreaded, each and every single city builder they've made had to be negotiated separately with different companies and private entities. That's why there was such massive lag before Emperor, the final game by Impressions, took so long to get on GoG

What traditional game is this artwork from?

It's obviously an allegory for the politician archetype.

Well, Sierra "had it coming" once Williams quit. In '96 they've entered corporate business and Williams stepped out of being CEO.
In '97, both Ken and Roberta left the new company entirely.
By '99, 35% of Sierra's employees have been laid-off, numerous divisions shut down and the company at that point went in 4 years from THE powerhouse of vidya to barely functional wreck. Ironically, when Impressions got green-light on their projects, it was done to capitalise on Caesar 1 & 2 being such hits, so the whole "Sierra city builder" genre happend more or less by accident.

Why does this keep happening?

Want to hear the joke part of it?
Sierra didn't enter corporate business out of greed, lack of funds, internal issues or anything like that. Both Williams were simply trying to build Disney Company of vidya and were doing great in this regard. Then they've decided that they've laid foundations for it, so they could both step down and watch their child project mature.
Half year later the new board was in the middle of destroying the whole company and another half a year later Ken decided to simply quit than fight with windmills. Then things went from "bad" to "horrible" within weeks. The new guys had absolutely zero clue about the business they were running and were too busy constantly rebranding the existing sub-divisions to notice the company as such is falling apart.
Once they've laid off most of devs (with games in progress), it was sealed. Then they've turned into publishing house, only didn't have a clue about that either and by 2002 the company was essentially existing due to accumulated in the past assets. By 2004 it was dead in all, but official bankrupcy papers.

And that's why you keep the suits on a leash...

No, that's why you don't allow suit joining at all. Sierra was one of those companies started by people from the business that spend all the 80s and first half of the 90s learning not just how to make games, but how to run a game-making company, essentially keeping everything in the house and knowing what to do. Which is part of the reason why it was doing so fucking well and for so many years.
Daily reminder that Half-Life was published by Sierra, publishing for some unknown nobodies called Valve.

Also, there is very, very related exact opposite site of the equation, regarding both Veeky Forums stuff, SMAC and other things:
GURPS
Part of the reason why SJG is such small company despite the fuck-huge potential in the late 80s is the complete and utter disagree to allow suits in, while also never learning how to be a suit yourself. This effectively cancelled any chances their game had, despite there being a boom for simulationist games back then. SJG currently exists solely due to Munchkin.

Again, that's why you keep the suits on a leash, rather than putting them in charge or not having them around.

Because we can't have nice things, user.
And because 90s were this magic era where a fuckload of awful corporate shit happend, but most of it was kept internal, so people consider it "golden period" for both Veeky Forums and /v/ stuff.

Oh Jesus bashful Aki is cute.

And imagine the cold mechanical fury that must have happened to make her declare independence.

> Like... what do they do all day?
I like to imagine they're doing a lot of dumb bullshit and/or crazy scientific research that is technically scientific but beneficial to no one.
Things like discovering new artificial flavors for poptarts, or splicing mind worm DNA into cats to see what happens.

Things that in no way relate to any of the tech trees, but it's still research.
Can you even imagine what their archives must be like? Just gigs and gigs of this weird, meandering, off-the-wall research, with exhaustive notes and scientific ponderings, and only then maybe once every hundred projects or so will they come across anything even remotely related to civ building.

It's like Alice In Wonderland in there, just going down the rabbit hole. But with science.

Wasn't this part of the canon to begin with? So that +2 Research bonus really represents the fact that once upon 50 or 100 research project, they still research something beneficial or some weird obscure shit from utterly useless and/or failed experiment still gave useful data in the end for something completely unrelated.
This and of course utter lack of any sort of ethics.

Data angels always felt like the inverse lal. An optimistic society upholding freedom but decentralized. Like it or not but Lal strikes as the cynical freedom keeper who's idea of fun is sitting in a library reading depressing literature and books on politics while everyone else is pigging out, spending dosh, fighting and fucking.